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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Vista "General Failure" Blues - and a fix!

WARNING: Technical content ahead! (My apologies for not including this statement in other recent posts!)

As you have probably figured out by now, I get asked to work on people's computers pretty often. I had one yesterday that was giving me fits. It was a Vista-based machine that would not connect to the network - any network. So, I did some troubleshooting, eventually giving the machine a static IP address because it would not pick one up through DHCP.

Even an assigned address did not work. During a PING test, the machine kept reporting "General Failure." That has got to be one of the most useless messages I've seen in a while. Naturally, I fire up Google on a working machine and poke around for a bit.

One suggestion had to do with repairing Norton Internet Security on a machine. Well, this computer did not have that, but did have references to something called "Norton 360." I tired uninstalling it, repairing it, you name it. More errors. I did a System Restore to about a week ago and while that didn't fix the network problem, it did let me re-install Norton 360. Once that was done, everything ran smoothly again.

There is obviously something happening between Symantec (Norton) products and Vista's networking! I just got lucky in that the Norton 360 installation file was still available to me on the mahcine. Otherwise, I would have had to back up data and reformat the hard drive back to factory specs.

So, if you encounter a "General Failure" when you try to run a PING test, or you have trouble getting connected at all, you may want to check to see if you have a Symantec product on your machine. If you do, try re-installing it (or even better UNinstalling!).

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Popped in my Head is copyright David Henderson. Individual articles are copyrighted based on their publication date. All opinions expressed on this site are those solely of David Henderson and not his employer or associates.